Romney Faults Obama on Energy Costs, but Has Cited Benefits of Rising Prices

Mitt Romney, center, greeted supporters at the Port of Pascagoula in Mississippi last month.Credit
Damon Winter/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — For several weeks, Mitt Romney has seized on the rising cost of gasoline to attack President Obama and his environmental aides for what Mr. Romney calls their misguided desire to see higher energy prices.

In an online town-hall-style meeting last week, Mr. Romney accused Mr. Obama of having a presidential policy intended to “see energy prices rise,” and he mocked the president for once saying that he would like gasoline prices to “change gradually.”

“They have put in place policies that are designed to reduce our production of fossil-based fuels and drive up the cost of energy and therefore encourage people to move towards wind and solar which are of course much higher cost,” Mr. Romney said in the Google+ hangout.

But Mr. Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, has in the past appeared much more open to the notion that rising energy costs could be good for the American economy. In his 2010 book, “No Apology,” Mr. Romney described a gradual increase in the cost of energy as the kind of market-based incentive that conservatives could embrace.

While not suggesting particular policies that might lead to higher prices — like an increase in the gas tax, a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade plan — Mr. Romney praised the benefits that would flow from a slowly increasing cost of energy.

“Higher energy prices would encourage energy efficiency across the full array of American businesses and citizens,” Mr. Romney wrote. “It would provide industries of all kinds with a predictable outlook for energy costs, allowing them to confidently invest in growth.”

In the book, Mr. Romney called for greater domestic exploration and drilling. And he expressed concern about the collateral damage from higher energy prices on people who drive great distances, businesses that consume a lot of energy and people on fixed incomes.

But he acknowledged that allowing the price for gas and oil to rise could be the centerpiece of “game-changing incentives” that would alter consumer behavior when it came to buying cars and using electricity. That, he wrote, could help the country wean itself off an overreliance on foreign oil.

“To become energy secure, we may need to turn to those game-changing incentives that will lead individuals and businesses of all kinds to invest in efficiency and to reduce their use of oil and energy,” he wrote.

Campaign aides say Mr. Romney’s position on energy remains consistent. They say the energy chapter in his book carefully lays out the beliefs he now espouses as he seeks to become the Republican nominee. Asked to square Mr. Romney’s statements in his book with his recent criticism of Mr. Obama, the Romney campaign replied by reiterating its assertion that the president is harming the economy by pushing for higher energy costs.

“President Obama is succeeding in his efforts to drive energy prices higher, producing the hardship for American families and businesses that Governor Romney predicted,” Andrea Saul, a spokeswoman for Mr. Romney, said. “This is exactly why the governor has always rejected proposals that would increase prices, and why he instead supports a strategy of developing the extraordinary energy resources that we have in this country.”

On the campaign trail and in the book, Mr. Romney has condemned what he calls the “radical, feel-good policies” like the cap-and-trade plan to confront global warming that Mr. Obama pushed early in his presidency.

“Such policies would have little effect on the climate but could cripple economic growth with devastating results for people across the planet,” he wrote.

And Mr. Romney continues to emphasize the need to increase domestic oil drilling, coal exploration and the use of nuclear power. He wrote that the “right step” is to “get started by authorizing exploration and infrastructure construction.”

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But as he has moved closer to the Republican nomination, Mr. Romney has adopted a much more aggressive approach to confronting Mr. Obama over energy prices.

That has intensified even more as the price of gas has jumped. In March of 2010, when the book was released, the average cost of a gallon of gas was $2.79. The current average price is more than $1 per gallon higher.

Mr. Romney has joined his Republican rivals and his party’s leadership in Congress in blaming Mr. Obama and his administration for the rise in gas prices. His favorite targets are the secretary of energy, the secretary of the interior and the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

He calls them the gas hike trio, reserving particular scorn for Steven Chu, the energy secretary. Dr. Chu told The Wall Street Journal in 2008 that, “somehow, we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

“This gas hike trio has been doing the job over the last three and a half years, and gas prices are up,” Mr. Romney charged this month. “The right course is they ought to be fired.”

In the book, Mr. Romney proudly recalls his father, George Romney, who ran an auto company, deriding his competitors’ cars as “gas-guzzling dinosaurs.” The younger Romney discusses the need to motivate people to buy high-mileage cars.

Noting the pain that accompanied the “oil shocks of 1973 and 2008,” Mr. Romney writes that the answer is higher gas prices with “predictability and gradual change, not a roller-coaster ride.”

That approach is embraced by many liberals and conservatives alike. One of Mr. Romney’s top economic advisers, N. Gregory Mankiw, an economist at Harvard University and a former Bush administration official, has advocated as recently as January for raising the tax on gasoline by more than $2 a gallon.

“If the tax on gasoline were higher, people would alter their behavior to drive less. They would be more likely to take public transportation, use car pools or live closer to work,” Mr. Mankiw, a contributor to the Economic View column, wrote in The New York Times.

Charles Ebinger, the director of the energy security initiative at the Brookings Institution, said Mr. Romney’s openness to the benefits of higher energy prices was similar to the approach that Mr. Obama’s advisers had espoused for years.

“I think that’s absolutely accurate in terms of what the administration has over time argued,” Mr. Ebinger said. “They always argued that it was a gradual increase that was needed. I think it is the same argument.”

Mr. Romney’s aides deny that, saying that Mr. Romney is clear in the book that the economic costs of policies like higher gas taxes are — on balance — greater than the benefits. Despite praising a “tax swap” that would increase gas taxes and lower payroll taxes, for example, he concludes in the book that “a great deal of work remains to be done if it is to become a viable option.”

Even so, Mr. Romney’s book suggests an openness rarely heard on the campaign trail.

A version of this article appears in print on April 3, 2012, on Page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Romney Cites Obama’s Energy Policy in Rise of Nation’s Gas Prices. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe